Friday, March 23, 2007

Three cheers for Tom Zreika leader of the Lebanese Muslim Association in Australia. His comments as reported in the Gulf Times come as a breath of fresh air.

“We are not at war,” says Zreika, who confirmed to AFP that details of his report published in The Australian newspaper yesterday were accurate.“We have become the new communism, particularly in the West, and some people in our community are so repulsed by our actions it is making life unbearable for us and our offspring,” Zreika says.Australia’s top Muslim cleric, Sheikh Taj Aldin al-Hilali, created a storm of protest late last year when he described scantily-dressed women as “uncovered meat” inviting rape.Faced with calls to get out of the country, the Egyptian-born cleric mocked the convict ancestry of many white Australians and said Muslims had more right to the country.In a nation where beach culture is strong and public service volunteers are hailed as heroes, Zreika said firefighting and lifesaving could help Australia’s 300,000 Muslims improve their image.“It would be great to see a turbaned imam fighting fires alongside other bushfire service volunteers,” Zreika, a lawyer, says in his submission to the Australian National Imams Council.“Organisations like the Surf Lifesaving Association should be joined as a matter of course by the imam and his followers.”

What he is talking about is intergration. Why is it that no leading Muslim figure in Western Europe is so honest about the failings of the Muslim community to integrate and the response that this creates in the indigenous populations?Could it be that in Australia they have in the persons of John Howard, Alexander Downer and Paul Costello, Ministers that are not afraid to defend liberal democracy and are prepared to fight against the self imposed dhimmitude of most European politicians and commenators?